animal

If you like your news straight up, just the facts, gray lady style, skip this story. MSNBC is launching some new toys for its news service that let you scan headlines in creative (and goofy) ways, and even play games with them. They're all part of the MSNBC NewsWare service.

Spectra is the service's new headline viewer. You select the categories you want to see, and it throws them up in an orbiting view for you. Each category has a color associated with it, which presumably gives you some subliminal clue as to where each headline fits in … Read more

Google SketchUp landed with a big splash last year, but it's not the only freeware option for budding 3D designers. From the makers of the popular scene-rendering program Bryce comes DAZ Studio for Windows and Mac, a powerful freeware 3D modeling and CAD program that looks great, but is a resource hog and can be sluggish for the average user.

The publisher recommends at least 256MB of RAM, but I found that to be wishful thinking at best. The program runs choppily on anything less than 1GB, although some of the more complex rendering was processed more slowly than … Read more

The men of the 404 go the distance with Frank Warren, compiler of Post Secret, one of the coolest sites on the Internet. We talk about the project, how it started, most common secrets, and even infidelity. Yes, we said it.

Plus, if you still want to win an edition of Weird USA, send us your best animal-human hybrids of the 404 hosts, Randall, Jeff, and Wilson. Free invitations are available to A.viary, if you click on the link from the 404 page.

UPDATE: NASA Etsy contest story here.

A.viary.com co-founder Michael Galpert joins us to talk about Adobe's latest online foray into a bad version of Photoshop (on the Web!). Plus a transgendered male is pregnant, and we start a contest (on a completely unrelated note) to create human-animal hybrids. If you want to win the board game Weird USA or just for the Hell of it, send us photos of the 404 host or just some guys as animal hybrids. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Back in the old days (like 2007), the marketing strategy for new albums included a prerelease "rolling thunder" PR campaign. First came a single, followed shortly by the video.

Then a few chosen reviewers would get early copies with "NOT FOR RESALE" imprinted across the front, allowing them to have their reviews ready slightly before or on the release date. Retail outlets would receive promotional matter, like cardboard cutouts of the band standing in front of the album cover. A few warm-up shows would feature songs from the record. Meanwhile, somebody--a reviewer, a disgruntled record … Read more

Getting legal clearance for samples and covers can be a real problem. For samples, if the copyright owner of the sampled song discovers you've used it without permission, they can sue to receive a portion of the proceeds--even if the sample's unrecognizable. Even getting permission doesn't always save you, as the Beastie Boys discovered. An article in a recent issue of SSA explores the issue in detail and concurs with Beck's assessement in 2005 that the legal issues with sampling will basically kill the practice in mainstream commercial music.

Covers generally require permission from the publisher, … Read more

I was at a bit of an impasse earlier today while writing about the new Google Maps page that lets you see user adjustments in real-time. A video to show off the feature would have been overkill, while an animated GIF afforded the same view to readers at a substantially smaller file size. Not having Photoshop installed on this machine (which has a pretty simple animated-GIF-making wizard), and not wanting to go through a tedious multistep process using Paint.net, I turned to Gickr.

Gickr is a simple tool that lets you upload up to 10 files from Flickr or … Read more

On Thursday, Japanese authorities announced the arrest of a college student and two associates who are alleged to have written and distributed a Trojan horse via a popular peer-to-per network.

Because Japan currently lacks computer crime laws, the three (whose names were withheld) were instead arrested on copyright violations. Between October and November of 2007, the author of a Trojan known as Harada used images of a popular anime character to entice users of the Winny P2P network to download the malware.

Computers infected with one strain of Harada displayed a message saying, "You're already dead. Come here. … Read more

I just got off a plane to arrive in Vegas for CES (where I'll be blogging here for y'all's reading pleasure). I saw this animation right before departing and it didn't make me feel real good about how many other people would be in the air at the same time...

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